Disqus - Latest Comments for chrismear

Re: Apple AirTags tracking tags leaked in Apple’s own video

Chris Tucker Mear — Sat, 04 Apr 2020 13:22:32 -0000

Apple claims to have designed a system to allow other people’s device to report the location of your device without sacrificing their own privacy: https://www.wired.com/story...

Re: Our apologies…

Chris Tucker Mear — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 07:39:41 -0000

Thanks for the update!

Re: 9 Ridiculous Kitchen Items We Can’t Believe Exist

Chris Tucker Mear — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 05:12:22 -0000

Some of these are clearly assistive devices designed to help people with various mobility problems, and it seems to be rather rude to mock them.

Re: That’s Not How You Use It: Keeping your Laptop Battery Plugged in

Chris Tucker Mear — Sun, 29 Sep 2013 08:44:27 -0000

If you're someone who usually uses their laptop plugged in, then this is fantastically poor advice. Repeatedly discharging and recharging your battery between 80% and 40% will burn through the battery's lifetime charge cycles really quickly, even given the extra cycles that you supposedly get by keeping it out of the 'stress' region. You'll end up with a dead battery far sooner than if you'd just left it plugged in most of the time.

Re: Protect Your Domains Using Two-Step Authentication - iwantmyname Domain Blog

Chris Tucker Mear — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 04:05:20 -0000

You can add a Google Authenticator account to Authy: http://blog.authy.com/authe...

Re: http://links.abscond.org/post/2742622282

Chris Tucker Mear — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 06:02:06 -0000

Safari: Start playing the video, then Window > Activity, and Option-double-click on the movie file.

http://cl.ly/0a3z3B040B3G16...

Re: http://365git.tumblr.com/post/508913253

Chris Tucker Mear — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 21:00:14 -0000

The colon syntax isn't entirely random; it comes from the full syntax for specifying a push:

git push remote_name local_branch_name:remote_branch_name

which is useful for those situations where your local branch and the remote branch you want to push to have different names.

So when you do:

git push origin :feature

you're effectively saying, "update the 'feature' branch head to point at NULL", which deletes the branch.

Re: iPhone auto-rotation: out of control - Ben Summers’ Blog

Chris Tucker Mear — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:15:35 -0000

I suppose a software update could add a user option to turn the existing mute switch into a rotation-lock switch instead. But, as you imply, it's easy to live without a hardware mute switch on a tablet -- it's more of a necessity on a phone.

And, as nice as it might be, I can't picture Apple adding a second toggle switch to the fourth-generation iPhone, seeing as how they're so keen to reduce the number of physical accoutrements on their devices. Will be interesting to see where they go with this.

Re: iPhone auto-rotation: out of control - Ben Summers’ Blog

Chris Tucker Mear — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:46:13 -0000

Of interest: "iPad's 'Mute' Switch Replaced With Screen Rotation Lock"

http://www.macrumors.com/20...

Re: The Rails Upgrade Handbook is now available

Chris Tucker Mear — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:08:36 -0000

Re: http://rubyquicktips.tumblr.com/post/387377542

Chris Tucker Mear — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 13:51:12 -0000

Might be worth mentioning that this is an ActiveRecord-specific thing.

Re: Joe The Dough: Planning

Chris Tucker Mear — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:01:37 -0000

For item 3, you want Dropbox: http://dropbox.com/

Re: KuraFire - CHU-CHU ROCKET, MOTHERFUCKER, DO YOU PLAY IT?

Chris Tucker Mear — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:22:43 -0000

I can totally see this becoming a meme.

Re: You are tone blind

Chris Tucker Mear — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 06:11:18 -0000

Strongly agreed. Whether the compliment was sincere or it was intended as a sarcastic attack, either way it rested on the assumption that Joel was "disguis[ing] a PR piece as an objective 'how to'", and that's insulting to Joel.

Re: cubicgarden.com...

Chris Tucker Mear — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 03:10:33 -0000

The reason alternative clients aren't appearing is that no client-server API has been standardised upon and published yet. Google's original position seemed to be that somebody writing a wave server would also write a wave client to work with that server, and invent their own client-server protocol. People are calling for a standardised protocol so that wave clients can be interoperable between wave server implementations, but at the moment Google is busy on other things and is leaving the community to try and decide on something, and a lot of the discussion seems to be going round in circles at this point.

In particular, the API that the current official Google Wave web client is using hasn't been published, although someone could reverse-engineer it. There is also the robots API, which is published, but you could only use it to simulate a user with limited capabilities, so that's less from ideal. So, at the moment, there are no official ways (other than the officially-provided web client) to talk as a fully-fledged user to Google's wave server; only hacky ones.

The only other protocol that's reached even published draft stage is the server-to-server federation protocol spec. The 'reference' implementation of a simple server and client you mention is really more an 'example' implementation at this stage. For client-server operations it uses a binary wire protocol which is only documented in code and which I'm pretty certain isn't the API that is being used over HTTP by the official web client to talk to the official wave server.

So you can see, it's all a bit messy and quickly-moving at the moment, which I think is why we've not seen an explosion in alternative servers and/or clients yet.

Re: Integrate Google Wave into your OS X system with Fluid

Chris Tucker Mear — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:19:32 -0000

Thanks for the write-up, particularly the nice icon and userscript!

Re: Chinese Company Sniffing Around The London Paper

Chris Tucker Mear — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:24:11 -0000

Life imitating art? http://www.theonion.com/con...

Re: How 37-Year Olds Consume Media

Chris Tucker Mear — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:46:32 -0000

You missed out 071 and 081! Those were the best.

Other than that, this 27-year-old's consumption habits are pretty much in line with yours. Let's go with the interpretation that this makes you young for your age, rather than the other way around.

Re: Going off the Rails - Ben Summers’ Blog

Chris Tucker Mear — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 08:07:05 -0000

This really hits the nail on the head for me. I've heard a lot of guff spoken lately about Rails' 'magic' making it an unworkable system. But, as you say, within its niche and assuming you're willing to learn some conventions about how it brings your scripts together, it's a good framework.

I think the problem is that its design is biased towards not requiring any OO knowledge, or understanding of how Rails works under the hood, in order to just get something simple up and running. But then, if you want to do anything outside of the box, you suddenly need to know that stuff.

At the risk of seeming 'holier than thou', I'm generally in favour of keeping things simple for beginners. The flipside, though, is that if you come to something like Rails already armed with good programming knowledge, it has an air of seeming *unnecessarily* magic. And certainly one of the things I'm looking forward to in the Rails/Merb merge is a bit more explicitness and consistency within the Rails environment, because I agree with you that it's been pushed a little too far in the other direction.

I think there's a parallel with the complaint from people who are used to statically-typed languages that dynamically-typed languages are 'too difficult to reason about' or even 'dangerous'. If you're used to something like Ruby, you know that these concerns generally don't matter in practice, at least for non-critical systems. Now, as someone who cut his teeth on dynamic scripting languages, and is only recently learning and programming with C-style languages, I can see the advantages of having a compiler check things for you, and there are certainly times I appreciate the 'stricter' feeling that hangs in the air. But, at the end of the day, they're both useful ways of getting things done in different contexts, and a lot of it comes down to personal preference.

Re: Ten and Counting - Matt Legend Gemmell

Chris Tucker Mear — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 20:58:16 -0000

Thank you for sharing this wonderfully thoughtful and inspirational reflection. And congratulations on coming this far.

Re: Four short links: 31 July 2009

Chris Tucker Mear — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:52:44 -0000

Just a heads-up: typo in the href attribute in the last link to 'Preparing Us for AR' is stopping it from working properly.

Thanks for the links!

Re: Un Assiette de Haricots

Chris Tucker Mear — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:10:19 -0000

tl;npl

Re: Un Assiette de Haricots

Chris Tucker Mear — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:06:57 -0000

HEUF DEUF MANGEUR DE BEURRE.

Re: Personal Data Flow Diagram

Chris Tucker Mear — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:59:38 -0000

Cor. That's pretty inspiring. I documented my previous calendar data flow here:

http://feedmechocolate.com/...

but I think I will have to upgrade that in light of your ĂÂźber-diagram.

Re: Show me your Dock!

Chris Tucker Mear — Wed, 20 May 2009 06:01:40 -0000

Here's my dock.

How do you get those gaps between applications?